The Brahmin and His Imaginary Friend

How a classic paean to the honest virtues of a Maine fisherman obscured several ugly truths

Old Christ Church in Alexandria. Virginia, attended by General Robert E. Lee in his youth and pictured here in 1911 (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign/Wikimedia Commons)

Divided Providence

Faith’s pivotal role in the outcome of the Civil War

Righteous Strife: How Warring Religious Nationalists Forged Lincoln’s Union by Richard Carwardine

“The Terrorist, He’s Watching” by Wislawa Szymborska

Poems read aloud, beautifully

Keepers of the Old Ways

Eliot Stein on the people keeping cultural traditions alive

Above the River of Your Longing

Two new prompts

Casa Gorín

“The Purse-Seine” by Robinson Jeffers

Poems read aloud, beautifully

Island Royalty

A new biography of a Caribbean revolutionary

The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe by Marlene L. Daut

The Writer in the Family

The fiction of E. L. Doctorow gave a young man hope of connecting his father and his literary hero

Birthday Boy

Julia Gutman

Shrouds of Memory

Experience Everything

How a letter from one great writer changed the life of another

Winter 2021

I Will Not Make Any More Boring Podcasts

What John Baldessari’s conceptual art can teach us about life during the pandemic

Long-Distance Punishment

Could a landmark work of conceptual art be an emblem for the Covid era?

What Flavor?

Satirist to the Galaxy

The war behind a writer’s words

Love, Kurt: The Vonnegut Love Letters, 1941–1945edited by Edith Vonnegut

“Wait” by Galway Kinnell

Poems read aloud, beautifully

White, Whiteness, Whitewash

The masks we wear in America

A Vision for Gene Therapy

Breakthroughs on mice could someday benefit humans

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